Today we are lucky enough to spend a
few minutes with another MAME developer. This time it's developer [Haze].

1. Name, Age, Location, etc.

David Haywood, 24, Derby UK.

2. Any opening comments?

I'd like to apologise to anybody else I said I'd do an interview for,
between life and working on MAME I never managed to find the time to answer.

3. Where do you work and what do you do?

Currently unemployed but studying, trying to sort out my life after a
bit of a rocky patch due to family issues when I was younger.

4. Where did the name [Haze] and your signature at mame.net come
from?

I guess Haze is just an evolution of my surname, from online gaming days.
I can't remember exactly how it came about. The signature is a line from
REM's Disappear and while I can't really say I like the album that line
stood out. Lyrics can be interpreted in many ways to me I guess the line
sums up some kind of insignificance, drifting in and out of hobbies without
any real commitment. The irony of course being that MAME is something I've
stuck with for a long time.

5. Can you tell us some of your early Arcade/Gaming Memories?

PAC-MAN was released the year before I was born, and
in all honestly I can only remember seeing one or two PAC-MAN machines
when I was younger, I missed that generation of gaming. There are one or
two classics I remember playing as a kid, Rally X, Moon Cresta, Out Run,
3 Screen Buggy Boy, and the monolithic Afterburner II cabinet. I was glad
to see Turbo Out Run emulated a few months ago as the last time I saw one
of those working I couldn't even reach the controls.

Personal arcade memories are few and far between, and by the time I could
really appreciate such games the industry was in a pretty rapid state of
decline, and usually the only time I saw any significant number of arcade
titles was when on holiday somewhere with family rather than locally.

Most of my memories are of the home systems
I owned, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, SMS and Mega Drive . The Spectrum
was my introduction to programming, I wrote several simple games in BASIC
as a child, creating my own challenge appealed to me. None of those games
exist anymore, a limited number of cassette tapes meant older games were
replaced with newer ones, and eventually erased completely. It’s a shame, some days I’d
like to be able to see exactly what I wrote back then, no doubt the code
was awful but it will forever remain a lost part of my childhood.

I always remember being disappointed by
Arcade conversions to the Spectrum. Out Run in monochrome just didn’t feel like the real deal in any
way. Original games were, for the most part, much better and in no short
supply. Games with level editors always appealed to me more than those
without again this was probably the desire to create my own challenges.
Kikstart II immediately comes to mind as one of those games I spent a large
amount of time with for this reason, as does ‘A Whole New Ball Game’ but
other titles are harder to remember.

I also enjoyed many Codemasters games
on the Spectrum, with the Codemasters mark quickly becoming something
I associated with high quality games at prices I could afford as a kid
without having to raid the bargain bin (although some of the games in
there weren’t too bad. Pi-R-Squared remains
something of a unique game, and Werewolves of London got many hours of
play)

Other games of note would include Doomsday Castle, Feud!,
Fred, Starquake, Stop the Express, Psst and Wizards Lair, but there are
many, many more.

The Spectrum remains a favourite platform of mine as far as emulation
is concerned, and thankfully there are some very good emulators, which
near perfectly reproduce the feeling of the original machines, right down
to the tape loading. Unfortunately many of the Spectrum games have aged
quite badly, especially compared to Arcade games, you could spend a lifetime
making remakes of Spectrum games which deserve them. The Head Over Heels
remake (http://retrospec.sgn.net/games/hoh/ )
is nothing short of amazing.

The Amstrad CPC had a few games I remember
too, High Steel (build your own skyscraper), Fruity Frank (a colourful
Mr. Do clone), UN Squadron (before I knew it was an arcade game) and
a fair number of others I can’t
remember.

Looking over sites with screenshots /
reviews of old 8-bit games is always nostalgic, and more often than not
I’ll see another title which I
once loved but had forgotten about.

The Amiga was an introduction to strategy games, which would later become
one of my favourite genres. The likes of Civilization, K240, Syndicate,
Populous, Power Monger, and Theme Park, Utopia occupied a large amount
of my time, games where planning and thinking were important to success.

The large selection of ‘Public Domain’ games available for
the Amiga made up a substantial amount of my catalogue, with many great
games providing hours of fun. Scorched Tanks with its large arsenal of
weaponry and crazy shields was one of the most played, Fruit Salad was
a cute arcade style game, Deluxe Galaga added a new dimension of game play
to the classic arcade title, and Super Obliteration was one of the best ‘Pang’ clones
I’ve played. The Assassins games compilations cover a large percentage
of the best Amiga PD games and are worth checking out in an emulator if
you ever have a few days free.

Coverdisks were also
a good source of games and demos on the Amiga, Gravity Power (a special
version of Gravity Force 2 made for Amiga Power) is probably the game
I spent most time competing against friends on, it also had a full level
designer with which I made many levels, sadly since lost. (I wish I’d been more careful with these things…)

Frontier: Elite II was a galaxy on a single disk in retrospect maybe
a little shallow but at the time immersive.

Project X, and Apidya were amongst the first shooters I could actually
stand to play, a genre where arcades without a doubt held the upper hand
for a long time due to their ability to handle far more complex scenes
full of bullets.

The Amiga was also one
of the more frustrating machines to own, with many disk swaps required
to load many games, irritating protection schemes on originals which
meant disks couldn’t be copied and usually failed
quickly create just as many bad memories of the system as good ones. Unfortunately
because of the way in which many of the games were designed the disk swapping
can even make the games frustrating under emulators today as many fail
to take advantage of additional disk drives, or can’t be installed
to hard disk.

Memories of the SMS and
Mega Drive were less significant, there were a couple of good games (Wonderboy
III – Dragon’s Trap, Toe
Jam & Earl etc.), but in general the high prices and inability to write
my own software meant the machines had a more limited appeal despite having
some very good games. A problem which still exists with modern consoles
today.

This answer still only represents a brief overview of my memories, I
feel guilty for excluding some games that deserve mentioning but a full
answer would take years of research and span several books.

6. Top 3 favourite video games of all time?

Choosing a top 3 is a near impossible task, many games have their individual
charms and I don't feel it fair to judge one as better than another in
many cases. The only game I'd say was certainly one of the top 3 is the
original RollerCoaster Tycoon for the PC (not the expansion packs, and
certainly not the 2nd game as that was dire, although the 3rd is very good
aside from a couple of crashing bugs and poor scenario design) Aside from
RollerCoaster Tycoon there are a couple of other games I'd throw into the
mix:

Wani Wani World ( Mega Drive
)

I picked this up as part of an exchange, swapping one English Mega Drive
game for 4 Japanese ones at a local store many years ago. I don't remember
exactly what I exchanged but I picked up Japanese carts for this, Super
Fantasy Zone, Strider, and an RPG, which never got played because I have
no understanding of Japanese. Out of the 4 carts I'd gambled on this was
a very pleasant surprise and remained my favourite Mega Drive game throughout
the time the system was in use.

The game is a more refined version of
Kaneko’s arcade release ‘The
Berlin Wall’ and retains many of the same characters and game play.
Best enjoyed as a 2-player game you must clear each level of enemies by
digging holes and watching them fall into them. Cute graphics, addictive
game play and some of the best bosses I’ve seen on the Mega Drive
meant it was a hard game to put down.

My only regret with this one I didn't really look after the games too
well, the shop in which the exchange was made didn't really value the Japanese
titles so nor did I and as a result they're in pretty bad condition now
(although still working last time I checked)

Parasol Stars (PC Engine / NES)

I
owned this for the NES, but the NES version is probably the weakest of
all the machines it was released on.

For some inexplicable reason Taito
never released this as a real arcade machine. The game is a sequel of
sorts to Bubble Bobble / Rainbow Islands (another two of my favourites)
with game play closer to the original Bubble Bobble than Rainbow Islands.

Bright
colourful graphics, and everything you’d expect from a cutesy Taito
game, the PCE version especially is superb and easily one of the best games
released on that system.

Fantastic Dizzy (SMS)

The Dizzy series was a big part of my
childhood, I’d always look
forward to the release of a new game in the series back on the Spectrum,
but was a series that never really made the transition to 16-bit platforms
very well. Fantastic Dizzy is actually no exception to this, with me preferring
the SMS version over the Mega Drive release.

Fantastic Dizzy combines elements from all the previous titles into one
huge adventure and manages to do that exceptionally well featuring some
puzzles from previous games, some new ones and a wide range of sub-games
based on some of the more action based Dizzy titles.

It’s a long game, a very long game,
and I only ever managed to complete it once on the actual SMS but it
was a satisfying experience.

Monkey Island Series
(PC / Amiga)

With the exception of the 4th in the series, which was
ruined by the non point-and-click control method and poor 3d graphics,
the Monkey Island games stand out as some of the most well written graphical
adventures to date. Scripts and dialogs combine a perfect blend of humour
with mystery and adventure as you guide Guybrush Threepwood though his
adventures on the high seas.

Day of the Tentacle may be arguably a
better game in this genre, but I didn’t have the chance to play that one when it was first released
which means I don’t have quite such fond memories of it.

The lack of arcade games may be something
of a surprise considering I spend so much time working on MAME, that’s not to say I don’t
like arcade games, on a different day I may have included some. The likes
of Out Run and Puyo Puyo are undeniably great games, and New Zealand Story
probably deserves a place here as it borders on perfection, but then my
list is also missing a large number of Amiga games I enjoyed such as the
original Settlers, or Morph and many of the Spectrum games I mentioned
previously.

7. Do you own any consoles or
Arcade Cabinets?

I don't really have the space to operate a full cabinet, although I do
own the Mega Drive as mentioned above, an SMS, and a Dreamcast.